We’re not real sure why people love to believe simplistic things about their health and the human body. Perhaps we like to believe simple folklore because, even if not true, it feels like a common, shared bond that “everybody knows” and so we can repeat with others knowing they’ll agree.
Leave it to the British Medical Journal and authors Rachel Vreeman and Aaron Carroll (2007) to spoil our holidays by debunking seven of the most commonly repeated medical myths about our bodies and living today. According to their review of the medical literature, each one of these tidbits of common wisdom are false:
- People should drink at least eight glasses of water a day
- We use only 10% of our brains
- Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death
- Shaving hair causes it to grow back faster, darker, or coarser
- Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight
- Eating turkey makes people especially drowsy
- Mobile phones create considerable electromagnetic interference in hospitals.
We’ve probably all heard one or more of these throughout our lives. Now go around and let your friends and family know that it’s actually a myth that that turkey Christmas dinner is making you sleepy (because that turkey contains no more tryptophan than other meets and actually helps your digestion). Cheers!
Read the full article, Medical myths, over at the BMJ.
Reference: Vreeman, R.C. & Carroll, A.E. (2007). Medical myths. British Medical Journal, 335: 1288-1289.
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3 Comments to
“7 Common Medical Myths Debunked”
Well that is good news and I will definatly be passing that one on to all the men that will be eating christmas dinner with us, no more I am tired from the turkey sorry can’t help clean up.
I do agree that alot of the time our society is so quick to just believe something and not really understanding what it is that we are excepting as our reality and then living by that. I have learned along the way since suffering from my depression and being a single mom of three that it is a little more work to do the research and not just believe the first thing but it is worth it. After finding insightpros.com and overcoming the my downs of depression and becoming a happy depressed person so to speak but I found out a lot of the truths that I believed were really myths. So it may be a little more work but it is worth the extra time to know that you are living truths and not myths.
I thought that #2 (we only use 10% of our brains) had its origins in Lashley’s infamous search for the engram. Lashley’s verdict was (if I remember rightly) that we only need 10 (or maybe it was 20) percent of the CORTEX (so didn’t include the deeper structures).
He had rats run mazes, you see. Once they were trained to run the maze he ablated parts of the cortex to try and figure out where the memory was stored. He found he could remove up to 80% (or perhaps that was 90%) before the maze running performance degraded. And he found it didn’t matter which 80% he removed. And he found graceful degradation in performance after that.
I thought… That was the origin of the popular belief…
Which makes it… A little less silly after all.
Hello, This is Mary
I am 36 years old with 2 toddlers. My youngest just started day care last week- which still feels a little strange. I haven’t had this much time to myself in years. First thing I want to do is lose the extra pounds I put on during the last pregnancy. One of the girls next door has suggested I join her walking group two days a week. After my first pregnancy I lost around 35 pounds using the Herbalife products, but when I called the man that sold them to me three years ago he told me this week he doesn’t sell them anymore. He told me to look on the internet. It’s disappointing because he was really nice and he called me regularly to make sure I was using their products correctly. It was nice to have someone checking in with me every week to see how I was and it kept me motivated.
I searched on the internet for someone that sells Herbalife in New Jersey. I found many websites but I don’t want
just to buy the products, I want to find someone trustworthy that sells the products so I can also meet them and get started again.
Could anybody here recommend someone in New Brunswick?
.
Thanks, Mary
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